At the end of a decade, it is common to try to pin a label on the era just past. Sometimes these simple pictures stick. "The thirties" and "the sixties" still conjure up visions (economic depression, hippies?), even if we have no personal experience to draw on. What will our vision be of the 1990’s?

A new book written by Andrew Jackson and David Robinson for the Canadian Centre for Policy alternatives, "The State of Working Canada 2000", provides a basis for economic vision of the 1990’s, by analyzing the economic data on what has happened to working Canadians over the last decade.

Clearly, what you think of the 1990’s depends a lot on where you happen to be sitting. To quote Dickens, "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." If you were a top executive in a big firm, or had the money to cash in on the stock market boom, you probably ended the decade feeling pretty good.

However, if you were like most working Canadians, you were worse off economically in 1999 than you were in 1989.

The nineties actually split, economically speaking, into two parts. In the early part of the decade, Canada had its deepest economic downturn since the thirties. The Canadian government actively used high interest rates to worsen the situation caused by the US recession, to ensure we had no inflationary takeoff following the introduction of the GST.

For the rest of the decade, the Canadian economy was slowly being pulled out of recession by the US economy, and making up lost ground, in spite of government policies (cutbacks, high interest rates) which continued to slow growth.

Over the whole decade, the broadest economic measure, real gross domestic product per person, rose by only 1.05% per year, about half the average growth rate in the 1980’s and 1970’s, and less than a third of the growth rate of the 1960’s.

Even this small improvement did not, however, make it into the pockets and bank accounts of most Canadians. The average weekly earnings of Canadian workers, after inflation, grew in total by only 1.5% over the last 10 years.

Real after-tax income per person actually fell by 3.3% between 1989 and 1999, because a smaller share of the population is working now than ten years ago. Corporate profits rose, governments went from deficit to surplus, but most Canadians fell behind in the nineties.

While the official national unemployment rate has dropped below 7% in 2000, the overall picture for most working Canadians is far from rosy. Much of the employment growth in the 1990’s was in part-time or casual work, and low-paid "self-employment".

The lower unemployment rate is also misleading because we still have a smaller share of our population, particularly young people, actively in the workforce. If the same proportion of Canadians had been in the workforce as in 1989, the unemployment rate for 1999 would have been 11.3%, rather than 7.6%.

This growing inequality has been complemented by the attack on the public sector, probably the key defining element of the 1990’s. The security provided by the public sector, the social safety net, is most important to low and middle-income Canadians.

Using deficit reduction and the demands of globalization as their rallying cry, governments over the last decade cut unemployment insurance and welfare benefits, and reduced funding to public health care and education, making most Canadians less secure, and financially worse off. Between 1990 and 1998, public health care spending fell by 5.1% per person, while private health care spending per person rose by 19.6% per person, to $733 a year.

We have been looking at overall averages, which can be misleading. The average wealth of Bill Gates and 99 of the rest of us is close to $1 billion, but that doesn’t mean that anyone but Bill Gates is wealthy. What we have seen in the 1990’s, continuing a trend from the mid-1970’s is growing inequality – the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and most of us in the middle a bit worse off.

So what will we call the 1990’s? A period of growing inequality, growing insecurity, declining public services and, as a result, perhaps a decline in the sense of community.

Would the "Nasty Nineties" be about right?